Bugs and whatnot have been reported in-game as I’ve found them, but I wanted to provide my general feedback to Blizzard. Not sure if that’s what they’re looking for in a stress test, but I hope that it helps regardless!
Decor Collection
I love the setup of decor. For the first time, I feel that all professions in the game and all old zones will have immense value to players due to the individual and stacking nature of decor. If I want to farm Northrend, I’ll be able to do that and make significant money. If I want to be an inscriptionist or skinner, I finally will be competitive with other professions for profit potential. Old profession items nowadays are pretty useless. While they may sell for decent prices, the volume simply isn’t there and many items are better to vendor rather than worry about auction deposit fees. Housing fixes that.
I really like having limited items that you can farm repeatedly. It adds something fun and special to see someone dedicate toward some obscure item, and it’s already sparked some fun social connections on the PTR. Please keep this in place!
I’m extremely glad to see old expansion resources utilized for this too. I saw decor I could buy with stygia, class hall resources, BFA war resources, and more. All of these leftover items were previously useless, but now they have purpose. This is especially nice when you go back to old expansions to farm mounts/appearances/etc., as you won’t have to choose between old content or making decent gold.
For my criticisms of the system, I feel that basic decor (the stuff in the town hub) is a bit too expensive. New-to-WoW players need to have something to make a robust basic home. I think that adding a discounted cost to repeat items would do well in this regard (if that tech is possible), if not just lowering those in general will help. Professions should have a handful of “basic” items too. Most everything I saw in engineering and enchanting would be quite time consuming for a new player to create, so it’d be nice if they had lower-level, lower-cost items they could create in each expansion.
Decor needs a Collect All and options to purchase multiples of a decor item. It’s a pain to manually add dozens you need individually, especially if there’s a pop-up confirmation for each one.
In addition, tracking that items will be difficult without mods or outside sources. I assume fixes are in the works, but my suggestions would include vendor names/locations or other sources similar to transmog (both in the catalog and possible to inspect house items), and possibly a housing renown perk or toy that allows summoning vendors for one-off purchases. For example, a toy that would summon a vendor of a part that you select in your home.
Neighborhoods
First and foremost, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR WEATHER. I hope that the weather is modified to be more like Elwynn Forest however, with more dynamic, infrequent, and longer storms. Weather is such a memorable thing for me from older WoW, and I’ve been so sad to see it become a shell of its former self in modern WoW. Please iterate upon this, bring back the peak of WoW weather, and this will be absolute perfection. (If people complain, allow private/guild neighborhoods to disable weather).
I’m sure a lot will come when it comes to finding other neighborhoods, so I won’t spend too much time here. I hope we can eventually search and find neighborhoods by name, join a neighborhood a friend is in (not their house directly), and browse through larger lists of neighborhoods. A friend was trying to buy their first house, and getting into the same neighborhood together was a huge pain.
The alliance neighborhood is absolutely fantastic, and well beyond my wildest dreams. So many little nooks and crannies, obscure places to explore, and so much of it is just so beautiful. The little towns, vendors, and the carriage are fantastic. I think if there are more random little events like traveling decor vendors, etc. outside of endeavors it would be even better, especially in the little RP spots around town.
The horde neighborhood looks cool, but needs more of the same little RP spots that the alliance area has. Horde area just feels like it has a lot more “under construction” type feel, sometimes quite literally with all the construction sites around the space. Their town hub also doesn’t feel interesting at all.
Houses and plots
Plot access should be allowed to Anyone by default; friends/party I think should be allowed inside by default as well. Flying around and constantly getting the threat of being booted out kills the vibe in public neighborhoods, and I think will be a big negative in launch. Sure, people can go private later–but I don’t think it should be the default option.
Other plot issues I feel are just normal PTR bugs or things that will be smoothed out later. I’ve seen countless feedback on this repeated elsewhere so I won’t go into further detail.
For housing, I overall like how robust the tools are to start. A few key things will make me extremely satisfied: 1) A duplicate tool (as long as you have an extra item in storage, it’ll make an exact copy of the scale/rotation/etc. of the original), 2) Some way to view all items in a room and all items in a house, and a way to highlight and/or zoom in on it for cleanup, 3) A “Swap” option for rooms (so for example you could actually move the first room you create), 4) A “Sync” or “Group” option (for example, have X Y and Z items all move, rotate, scale with one another and act as one item) with a selected item as the base (for rotation/scaling). Sort of like how tables work, but letting you force it.
I love the current lack of limits existing now. Floating objects, putting trees on your house, putting trees inside your house–these are all great. I don’t think any further restrictions should be placed here unless there’s a performance reason for doing so (i.e., lights on the exterior). I hope more interior/exterior restrictions otherwise are removed, I don’t think anything should be restricted indoors for example.
Future wishlist
I hope to see roaming pets, roaming or stabled mounts, music selection, indoor weather machines (let us make a rainy room or a snowy room!), ways to showcase achievements such as in a plaque, and ways to showcase armor sets we’ve collected.
I would also love if we have the ability create a permanent copy of deployable non-utility toys in our house. For example, we can place target dummy toys down. There should be an option to just have that toy always deployed at a specific spot with a decor cost. I’m sure that would be complicated to implement, but it would be awesome to integrate more of our collections into our home. There are a lot of toys that I might go out and farm for additional ambiance, but I wouldn’t normally have interest of using them out in the world.
Having our warband members roaming our house in some manner would also be pretty cool, but I’ve heard that mentioned in an interview before as hard to achieve.
I think that’s all that’s on my mind for now. I appreciate the opportunity to stress test and submit bugs and feedback!
